You may need to prepare your data for import if you have a spreadsheet, locations in multiple columns, or intend to merge with another table.

We recommend that tables have less than hundred columns. As the number of columns goes up, performance degrades during file import and INSERT with the Fusion Tables API. Fusion Tables handles each row as a unit, and the import or insert of a row will fail when the total size of data in the row is greater than approximately 1MB. There are hard limits of 5,000 columns per table and 1 million characters per cell.

Quotas

We support a quota of up to 1 GB per user. When someone shares a table with you or if a table is in your trash it does not count against your quota.

Spreadsheets

Only the first sheet is imported to Fusion Tables.

The Google Docs limits on total number of cells, columns and maximum file size apply each time a spreadsheet is imported. If a spreadsheet file is larger than these limits, save it as a .csv or other delimited text file and then import it.

CSV and other text delimited data files

Comma-separated value (.csv) files are a standard way to represent database values in text. Cell values with comma, newline or quotes must be quoted and quotes escaped by doubling. For example: "17"" LCD display".

By convention, the first row acts as header and defines the names of the columns in the data. However, you can specify which row is the header during import.

Another character (for example, a tab, pipe or semicolon) can be used instead of a comma to separate data values in a text file. When importing a file like this, please specify the delimiter during import.

KML

Keyhole Markup Language (.kml) is an XML-based standard for specifying geospatial information and structured data in text. KML import allows you to specify points, lines or polygons for mapping locations in Fusion Tables. These tables can be merged with other tables to create custom intensity maps.

The geometry column should be auto-detected as a column of type Location. If using KML descriptions without importing a KML file, set the column to type Location after import.

Each placemark becomes a row in the table, where columns are created for the placemark name, description, geometry, and each extended data or schema data attribute. When displayed on a map, complex descriptions of lines, polygons, and multi-geometry may be down-sampled.

You need to unzip .kmz files before import: Either open in Google Earth and use Save As or use an unzip utility. Timestamps, styles, and many other clever things possible to encode in KML may not be supported during import.

Some vector geometry files may have a very large amount of data. Fusion Tables has a 1 million character limit in a given cell. If the number of characters used in a KML description exceeds this limit, the import will fail.

In general, if you have a KML for multiple discrete shapes, you may want to put each shape in its own row rather than put all the KML into one cell.